Linda Barlow

by Fires of Destiny

  “You fainted, mistress. When was the last time you ate?”

  “I can’t remember. Yesterday sometime.” She shook her head slowly. “I never faint. But last night I did not sleep.”

  “Are you with child?”

  “That would be a rare miracle, sir, since I’m still a maid.” With a shudder she remembered Geoffrey. And Roger, that night in Merwynna’s cottage. “Just,” she added grimly, closing her eyes again.

  “Does Roger know this?”

  She shook her head. “What he thinks he knows and what is actually the truth are two different things.” The man was sponging her throat with a damp cloth. She wondered why, and then she remembered that Roger’s knife had cut her there. It could not have been much of a cut, for it did not hurt and the cloth was not bloody. “Who are you?”

  “I am Thomas Comstock, a physician.”

  Thomas Comstock. She remembered his name. Roger had mentioned him yesterday afternoon when he’d showed her the cellars. Yesterday afternoon? So recently? It seemed as if an age had passed since then.

  “Do not worry; this is but a scratch,” he said. “Does it pain you?”

  “No. It is nothing.”

  “It bled very little, but I wanted to cleanse it for you. Your collapse worried me more. I wanted to make certain you were not dangerously ill.”

  “You must go to your other charges, then, sir. There are people aboard who need you more than I. I’m stiff and sore and heartsick, but Francis Lacklin, for one, is at death’s door. Unless he has already died?”

  “No, he lives. Whether he will survive this day, I am not certain, but I will do my best to save him, for Roger’s sake.”

  She caught the tone in his voice and looked at him more closely. “You love Roger, don’t you?”

  “Aboard this ship, everybody loves him.” He gave her his sad-eyed smile. “If you have injured him, they’re not likely to have much love for you.”

  “No, I imagine not,” she said dryly. “This is his cabin?”

  “Aye.”

  “And I’m to be kept here, bound, in his bed?”

  “Don’t be afraid.” Although he glanced a little doubtfully at the cut on her throat, he added, “For all his moodiness and passion, he is not violent toward women.”

  “He was violent toward Celestine de Montreau.”

  Comstock’s eyes grew, if possible, sadder. “You know of her? It’s true she and Roger were in constant conflict toward the end; they argued, but he was never violent, except in his language.”

  Thank God! She hadn’t really believed Geoffrey, but she hadn’t seen Roger so vicious a rage either, until last night. “How did she die, then?”

  “She died of severe internal bleeding after the child she had conceived took root and grew not within her womb, but in the tiny duct beside the womb. Malplaced pregnancy is a rare condition, and one that few, if any, women survive.”

  “Oh my God.” She knew it was possible that a baby could grow outside the womb, although she did not understand exactly how that could happen. She had seen it once in a shepherd’s wife whom Merwynna had tried to treat. The woman had died bleeding and in great pain. “Celestine’s brother told me Roger had beaten her, and Roger didn’t deny it.”

  “Roger holds himself responsible for her death because they fought bitterly on the night she died. But he did not beat her. I was here and I saw. There was not a single mark upon her. As I repeatedly told him at the time, he did not cause her miscarriage or her death. Both were inevitable from the moment the child was conceived. No one was to blame.”

  Alexandra began to laugh somewhat hysterically. She wished she could cry. All night long she’d held back her tears, but now, when she wanted to cry, she laughed instead. No one was to blame for Celestine’s death, and Geoffrey de Montreau had had no reason to demand revenge. All the deaths tonight, all the heartache, had been for naught.

  Comstock waited until she had controlled herself marginally, then quietly suggested a drug to help her sleep. First he insisted that she change out of her wet garments, and found her a linen shirt from Roger’s chest that was much too large for her. He untied her wrists so she could undress, and bound them again much more loosely after she changed into the shirt.

  “Yes, give me your potion,” she said without hesitation. Temporary oblivion would be preferable to this soul-tearing pain.

  She curled up on the cabin’s only bunk and drank the bitter draught he brought her. Within minutes she slept.

  *

  It was night again when Roger finally climbed the ladder to the captain’s deck and unlocked the door to his cabin. During the day a summer storm had come up, battering the vessel with high winds and crushing waves. For most of the daylight hours Roger had been kept busy shouting the orders that would keep the ship and its crew members safe from the foaming power of the sea. It was a battle he’d fought many times before, a battle that always gave him a strange feeling of exultation as he matched wits with the mighty forces of nature. It was a clean fight, devoid of the malice and pettiness of human strife. On the day the sea won—and he knew that day might come—he would surrender gracefully and accept her victory with none of the bitterness he would have felt toward a human enemy.

  The storm had been a mercy. It had given him an excuse to forget about Geoffrey, Francis, Alix. But it was over now, and he could no longer escape the thoughts and images that were flooding his brain. Francis, taking the blow that had been meant for him, bleeding, dying. Geoffrey, his feral face twisted with satisfaction. And, worst of all, Alix. Let me hold her once more to my heart. How malicious were the gods.

  For several hours he had sat beside Francis’ bedside in Tom’s makeshift infirmary below-decks. The physician was not hopeful. Francis’ right lung had been grazed, he had bled profusely, and he showed no signs of regaining consciousness. “He’s a strong man,” Comstock had conceded, “but if putrefaction sets in, he is unlikely to survive.”

  “Isn’t there anything more we can do for him?”

  “We can pray.”

  Roger swore at that. “Aye, God is good, God is just. Where’s the sense in this? Innocent, godly people have been slaughtered and Francis is dying after putting his body in the way of a sword intended for me. I’m as sinful as he, but I, as usual, am alive and unscathed. The Lord, in his mercy,”—his voice was a sneer—“never punishes me directly. Instead he tortures me by massacring everyone around me.”

  “Such thinking is the height of arrogance. You are responsible only for your own destiny, not for that of your friends. Besides, the good Lord undoubtedly knows that you’re an expert at punishing yourself, and for far more sins than you’ve actually committed.”

  “Francis lies here dying because of me.”

  “What better way to die than in defense of somebody you love?”

  Roger slammed his fist into the wall. He neither wanted nor felt he deserved that kind of love.

  Later he had sat drinking with Daniel Bunty, his old friend and second-in-command. Bunty had been the master of the Argo since Roger had left it to return to England. Bunty had tried in his gruff way to ease his mind, urging Roger to tell him exactly what had happened. But Roger didn’t want to talk about it. Talking only increased his grief and fanned his rage.

  The aqua vitae he was downing should be lessening his misery, but it didn’t seem to be working, and he stopped before consuming too much. Francis didn’t like it when he drank.

  As the ship rolled and his mind pitched with it, Roger began to imagine how he would punish Alix for her betrayal. The images were confusing. His violent emotions were eroticized as he saw himself forcing her into an assortment of sexual acts, many of which were painful and degrading. The fantasies troubled him, but he hadn’t the will to stop them. Strangely enough, they all ended with her crying out in pleasure rather than pain.

  Daniel Bunty must have noticed his preoccupation, for when Roger rose resolutely to his feet, his old friend put a restraining hand on his arm. �
�You’re not going up to that young lassie, are you?”

  Roger was aware by now that everyone on the ship knew of the woman he had imprisoned in his cabin. Rumors had been flying all day as to who she was and what crime she had committed. Roger had confirmed none of them. He had refused to talk of her. He’d even managed to ignore Tom Comstock’s objections to the way he had treated her so far.

  “Aye, that’s exactly where I’m going,” he said now. “She’ll be missing me, no doubt.”

  “She is no light-o’-love, but a gentlewoman, and you’re in no fit state tonight for such.”

  “Enough, Daniel. Don’t interfere with something that is no concern of yours.”

  Bunty backed down, but he didn’t look pleased about it. “I only wish to prevent you from doing something you may regret in the morning, my friend.”

  “My regrets, or lack of them, are no one’s affair but my own.”

  When he entered the cabin, soaked to the skin with rain, and gritty-eyed from lack of sleep, he found Alexandra lying in his bed. Her slender body was partially covered by a blanket, her hair was spread in a fiery mantle over her shoulders, and her sleepy green eyes were apprehensive as they blinked and stared into his.

  She looked artless and young lying there. She looked like the woman he loved. But she had spent months among the cats and spiders at court, and she had intruded time and again in places where she was not wanted, ignoring all his threats and warnings. Whether or not she had intended the harm she had caused, she was still responsible. How many good people were dead now because Alexandra Douglas could not bring herself to stay the hell out of his affairs?

  “Good evening, Alexandra. No, don’t get up. You are exactly where I want you—in my bed, at last.”

  She slowly sat up, encircling her upraised knees with her arms. She winced a little as she moved. Was she in pain? Or pretending to be in pain? Was anything about her real? He no longer knew what to believe.

  She was wearing a man’s linen shirt. It must be one of his. It was big on her. The sleeves were too long and the fabric hung loose around her upper body. Her wrists were still bound together with rope. Roger stared at them, taking a twisted pleasure in the sight.

  “Roger?” Her eyes were huge. “Will you listen to me now?”

  He crossed the tiny cabin in two strides. Laying his hands upon her, he sank his fingers into the red flames of her hair. “No. No excuses.”

  She spoke anyway: “I am heartsick about my part in this tragedy. But you are not my judge.”

  “As master of this vessel, I am everybody’s judge. And you, my traitorous love, are guilty. All that remains is your punishment, which I am here to administer.”

  Chapter 26

  Alexandra made no answer. All the words she’d planned to say to him were sticking in her throat. He looked, she thought, like a scourge sent from hell to torment her. Standing over her in the dim glow of the single lamp she had clumsily managed to light a little while before, he filled the small cabin with his dark energy. His clothes were shining with seawater and rain, his face was sculpted hard and expressionless. Only his eyes gave his emotions away, and they caused her more disquiet than anything else; she could never remember seeing them so black with anger, pain, and cruel determination.

  She closed her own eyes. Ever since she’d woken from a restless sleep to find herself still alone and imprisoned, she’d tried to plan what she would say to him when this moment arrived. Not even the storm had claimed her attention, although at times the tossing and plunging of the ship had been so severe that she thought they must surely founder. The tempest in Roger disturbed her far more deeply than the tempest outside.

  And now that the time had come, she knew there was nothing she could say, nothing he would believe. To a certain extent, she was guilty of the things he believed she had done. Through her meddling, his plans had become known, through her foolishness, his friends had died. If it hadn’t actually been she who had broken down and revealed the details of the plan to Geoffrey, that was only because the Frenchman had been clever enough to question Alan. Either one of them, she thought, might have resisted the rack alone, but who could bear to see a dear friend tortured if there was a way to stop it?

  As for Roger’s belief that she had shared a bed with Geoffrey, that too was true, even though the act had not reached a conclusion. If he wanted a woman whose body had never known the touch of another man, she was no longer that woman. If he could not forgive her for something that had been done to her against her will—and many men would not, she knew—there was nothing there, either, to be said.

  She watched him throw his cloak to the floor beside the berth, splashing tiny droplets of seawater on her. His doublet was next. She heard the creaking sound of thick fabric being roughly pulled apart. What was he doing? Was he going to rape her? Was that the punishment he intended? She had feared it once, and then felt the heaviness of her folly for believing him capable of such cruelty. Now, though, that they were in this hellish place, almost anything seemed possible. Was the love she had dreamed of consummating with him about to be sullied in such a manner?

  “Roger?” She wasn’t sure exactly what was behind her impulse to speak his name. To reassure herself, perhaps, that this dark avenging angel was really the man she loved?

  “Be still.” His boots came off and he bent to work the points of his hose. “I don’t wish to hear a single word from you. You didn’t know how to keep your mouth shut last night; tonight, I promise you, you will learn.”

  She ignored this; talking was her only defense. “Shall I undress or would you prefer to rip this garment off me?”

  Something flashed in his eyes, and for a moment she thought he might strike her. But he did not. He seemed more in command of himself than he had been the previous night on the strand.

  “And here I’d been thinking you’d lost your spirit when you gracefully fainted in front of my entire crew. That, too, I suppose, was an act?”

  “‘Twas real, as your physician will surely attest.”

  “Oh, he’s been attesting right and left. But he’s been celibate for so long he can’t tell the rotten apples from the sound. He’s a former monk, and still a godly man. He once worked with the Hospitalers of St. John.”

  “I love you,” she said, apropos of nothing.

  There was a distinct sucking sound as Roger caught his breath. The anger in his eyes flared up, and then he gave a cruel, contemptuous laugh. “That’s the last one of your lies I want to hear tonight.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “Everything you say is a lie. You are a lie, and I am a fool.” His next words were curses as the knots binding his hose stuck. He tore them away and finished stripping in a series of short, impatient motions. “How amusing you must have found my quaint reluctance to dishonor you. All this time you’ve been a duplicitous bitch.”

  He tossed away the last garment and turned to her, his naked skin gleaming in the light from the lamp. He was hard and lean, and appealing in all the ways that Geoffrey de Montreau had not been. Broad shoulders, smooth well-defined muscles, a flat belly, trim buttocks, and long well-shaped legs. Her eyes were drawn to the glossy crinkles of hair that extended in a narrow ribbon down over his ribs and navel to thicken between his thighs. Less fearful than fascinated, she stared at the spear of flesh and muscle nestled in that thicket of hair. He was not particularly aroused, she noted. That was a good thing, surely? Mayhap he didn’t like this situation any more than she did.

  But as he bent over the bed, the light glinted off something metallic in his hand. The dagger from his sword belt. She was afraid then. A pit of dark unreason seemed to open beneath her feet, and she was back in the cave at the top of Thorncroft Overhang where he had come at her with a naked sword.

  “No!” she gasped, putting up her bound arms to resist him as he put one knee on the bed and seized her.

  “Defending your virtue?” he mocked.

  “I have no care for my virtue, and beside
s, you’ll know your mistake soon enough. But I will fight for my life.”

  His lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “Trembling? Where’s your famous courage?” Settling down on the bunk beside her, he captured her flailing hands and wrenched her closer. The knife blade flashed as he slid it between her wrists. “It’s to cut your bonds, not your throat.” As the cord fell away, his fingers chafed her flesh to soothe the spots, but when he caught himself doing so, he stopped. Although her skin was lightly scored, there were no rope burns; she had not been cruelly tied.

  “I would have sworn you’d prefer to have me bound and helpless.”

  “On the contrary, I want your hands free. I’m going to make you show me all the clever tricks you’ve learned to do with them.” He used the knife to slice through the laces of the shirt. She grabbed at the edges as the fabric gaped, revealing the curve of her breasts.

  “Slip it off your shoulders. Slowly. Artfully. You’ve had the practice, I’m sure. I want to look at you. I want to see exactly what I’m getting.”

  She neither answered nor obeyed.

  Almost casually he touched the edge of the blade to her throat. There was a scratch there already, and he was startled to realize that he must be responsible for it. He lowered the knife, but kept his voice hard: “There’s one small detail about seafaring life you still seem to be ignorant of. I repeat: I am this ship’s master, which means I have absolute authority over everyone on board. My orders are obeyed without question or hesitation. Anyone foolish enough to rebel is disciplined harshly. Am I making myself clear?”

  “I am not a member of your crew. I don’t recognize your authority.”

  There was a moment of silence between them, broken only by the creaking of the timbers and the roaring of the sea. Then Roger pushed her down on her back beneath him. He let the dagger slip through his fingers to the floor. “Defiant as ever. So be it.” He took her lips in a ferocious kiss, thrusting his tongue into her mouth. She arched in protest, then slackened beneath him, becoming surprisingly passive. He had expected her to struggle. Indeed, he’d been looking forward to it.